Jason Mankey over on Patheos Pagan has some words to say about social media within Pagandom. In summary, his argument is that the online community (itself a problematic thing to discuss) is not real and does not have real impact on real lives.
I disagree, on a variety of levels. Reading the comments actually caused me to have a very visceral reaction – I was able to witness yet again someone who would claim community with me say my very existence is too politically correct to allow for spiritual work – and I took a few hours to decompress. (If you don’t like PC-ness, though, there’s a video that will be full of rambling and no-holds-barred ranting. This is the coherent, proper version.)
The problem when claiming the online community is not real is layered, and it gets even more complicated due to the nature of paganism, polytheism, and our separate communities. First, not everyone who interacts in pagan communities, on pagan sites, or with pagan blogs is a pagan – and here I’m not talking of Christians or Muslims but polytheists, spirit workers, and the like that most people would consider ‘pagan’ but who don’t use or have rejected the term. Someone getting upset, telling you that they are not a pagan but instead are [x], becoming irate, or any other reaction is normal, and the common reaction of either a) “You’re really a Pagan/our religions are really the same” or b) “We all bleed red!” is not okay. The theme of self-identity is one we will return to later on, as it’s relevant to the comments on the blog post, and it’s also something many well-known pagan groups have trouble dealing with.
When we’re trying to discuss this nebulous community, we also need to remember that it doesn’t really exist in a universal sense. There are different social media sites and forums and blogs that interact, and each has its own rules, unspoken assumptions, and audiences. Tumblr is known for screaming matches, where you have to pick out the useful information from all the caps lock yelling. eCauldron has great information and good discussions but a level of ‘no-nonsense’ that chases some people off. Some people hang out on Patheos Pagan, others at Bishop in the Grove or the Wild Hunt. Each of these has their own community that interacts within themselves. There is some crossover, yes. But these are all separate communities. They have different rules, expectations, assumptions, and allowances, and there are different ways to ‘make it‘ in each. The people within these communities don’t necessarily (or usually) have the same religion or even similar beliefs or practices. There are different concerns, values, and goals in these communities.
And, despite what people keep trying to tell me, these virtual spaces are actual communities.
It’s a group of people who interact and dialog and set limits and boundaries – this is who is inside the community, this is who is outside. Sometimes that boundary is drawn by who has a membership to which site, and sometimes it is drawn by the values we hold or the experiences we’ve had in life. People lose online friends the same way they lose offline ones. People form close relationships, romances, and cliques online. The only thing that seems to make these communities ‘not real’ is that they aren’t based on physical proximity.
I admit my bias – I have been making friendships and engaging in online communities since I was able to use a computer and have consistently had better experience online than off. So I’m a fierce defender of the existence and value of online communities.
But I would like for someone to explain to me exactly why online communities are not real, because physical proximity is not something I consider the be-all end-all decider. If I do not get along with my local communities or group or have serious problems with them, they are not my community simply because I live close to them. Online communities support each other emotionally and financially just like other communities. They form like other ‘real’ communities’. They go through the same phases that ‘real’ communities go through.
The article wasn’t just a rehashing of the tired declamation of online activity, though. It asked whether online activity does anything to affect the real world.
Many, many people love to claim that the internet doesn’t affect the offline world, especially in matters of social justice. But this claim is obviously silly on the surface and outright erroneous once you go deeper – the internet affects almost everyone’s lives now. Sure, you can be pissed off about that, but it does. We use it to communicate, to relax, to dialog and discuss, to research, to build audiences, to fund-raise – all things which have ‘real’ impacts. Beyond that, the force of the internet can shut down or rile countries, destroy personal and political lives, and force us to confront the oppression that seeks to slide by quietly in our lives.
The claim that people aren’t discussing what bloggers are discussing and so our discussions are not important, necessary, or changing anything, the claim that there must be some trickle down into flesh and blood communities (which we are already – even if we communicate through text, there are flesh and blood people communicating online), is used most often to silence important, difficult discussions that need to be had about oppression, privilege, and problems within a community or group. Just because a group of friends doesn’t know about the latest ‘fiasco’ doesn’t mean the discussion around it isn’t important. In fact, I can tell whether or not I am in a safe space by how people react when I bring up these online discussions that are ‘popular’ – if they don’t know anything about it, I can inform them; if they do and brush it off as people just getting ‘too PC’ I will know then and there that I am not in a safe space and should leave.
So, yes, the issues we’re discussing online do affect people’s day to day life. Just because they don’t affect yours doesn’t mean they don’t affect someone else’s. The transphobia in our various communities affects me every day. The problems we’re discussing don’t just ‘exist’ online, and saying that they aren’t ‘actual’ issues is a great way to erase people’s actual, you know, lives.
There are discussions I don’t engage in because I don’t understand them, but I do try to listen. You don’t need to be speaking to gain something from a conversation. And if you’re confused –
we have Google.
***
[Obviously, my existence as a trans* person heavily influences my religion, and seeing yet another pagan say that ‘cis is a word that divides’ us makes me angrier than I can properly convey – because it is reminding me that my existence, the fact that I breathe, is too ‘controversial’ to be allowed.]